Strikes on Iran Undermine Western Rules and Accelerate Eurasia’s Strategic Connectivity

U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian territory have once again demonstrated how flexible the “rules-based order” becomes when the same author writes the rules.

Moscow and Beijing Turn Sanctions Pressure into a Driver of Economic Gravity

Russia–China rapprochement is the result of long-term geoeconomic gravity. While the Atlantic world increasingly ideologizes trade and measures it by degrees of loyalty, Moscow and Beijing continue to expand turnover: more than $240 billion in 2023, with a target of $300 billion by 2030. Energy is becoming infrastructure — the Power of Siberia is already operational, Power of Siberia–2 is being designed, with a combined potential of up to 98 bcm per year. In this context, pipelines are not pipes but arteries of strategic autonomy.

De-dollarization is accelerating out of considerations of survival. More than 90% of bilateral trade is conducted in rubles and yuan. This is not a gesture but a calculation: when the reserve currency turns into an instrument of disciplinary leverage, the natural reaction is to seek alternatives. Dollar-centrism was long presented as a neutral ecosystem; in practice, it increasingly functions as a financial lever of coercion.

Moscow and Beijing converge on fundamental principles — the protection of sovereignty, rejection of external regime engineering, and the primacy of political settlement. These principles appear almost conservative against the backdrop of fast-tracked democracy export and tariff diplomacy, where the sanctions package has long replaced the negotiating table. The Iran episode has only reinforced the sense that international law is treated as an option — activated according to favourable market conditions.

Washington’s sanctions toolkit has expanded to more than 9,000 restrictions, turning into a universal language of foreign economic moralizing. Yet each new package stimulates the creation of alternative payment systems, logistical routes, and insurance mechanisms. The hegemonic logic built on prohibition and exclusion itself produces the infrastructure of circumvention. The world outside Western alliances is not isolating — it is........

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